The great journalist H.L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public — but I may be about to prove him wrong.
Three or four months ago, I started betting various friends that the Democrats would lose control of both houses of the US Congress in the mid-term elections this November. I was way ahead of the opinion curve, so I got lots of takers.
But now, when the general opinion has shifted in that direction, I begin to think I was wrong. And it all has to do with the “Ground Zero mosque.”
If you have been paying attention and are fully sentient, you will know that it is not actually a mosque. If the sponsors can raise the money (which remains to be seen), it would contain a prayer room, but also a restaurant, a 500-seat theatre, basketball courts and a swimming pool that would be open to all.
It would not have a minaret, but there would be a memorial to the 3,000 people (including 300 Muslims) who died in the 9/11 attacks.
And it is not, of course, at Ground Zero. It is two blocks up and around the corner, invisible from where the World Trade Center once stood.
Not that there’s any reason for it to hide around the corner: there’s nothing wrong with an Islamic cultural centre. It should also be pointed out that the Pussy Cat Lounge, an upmarket strip club, is closer to the site and not invisible at all.
So should we ask whether those on the right wing of the Republican Party who started this business about a mosque at Ground Zero intended to exploit the latent Islamophobia of the American public? You might as well ask if the Pope is a Catholic.
This is a “wedge issue,” deliberately concocted to drive the dimmer elements of the Republican Party into supporting the right wing’s other positions as well.
I hear you protesting that the Republican Party doesn’t have a left wing any more, so how can it have a right wing?
But everything is relative in politics, and the real contest this autumn is not being held in November. Most Congressional districts have been gerrymandered to the point where they are safe seats for one party or the other, so the real contest is in the primary (which chooses the party’s candidate) in any given district.
Senate seats cannot be gerrymandered in the same way, but there are also bitter primary struggles between “left” and “right” Republicans in many of them. Republican senator John McCain, the former presidential candidate, survived the Arizona primary on Aug. 24 only by shifting sharply right on many issues, including climate change and immigration. Other moderate Republican senators are doing the same, but they may not be so lucky.
The “Ground Zero mosque” campaign was begun by players like Fox News and Mark Williams, organiser of the Tea Party Express, who warned that “The mosque would be for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey god.” (It’s really hard to tell Muslims and Hindus apart, especially if you’re really stupid.) But the campaign works for the hard right because a large proportion of the US population is anti-Muslim.
Exactly how large nobody knows, but we may safely assume that the 24 per cent of Americans who believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim are not thinking: “Good. When Americans elected a black, Muslim president, we showed how tolerant the country is.” They are thinking: “Oh my God, there’s a black Muslim terrorist in the White House. America is doomed.”
Let us assume, therefore, that the proportion of Americans who fear and hate Muslims (in most cases without ever having met one) is somewhere between that 24 per cent and the 61 per cent, according to a recent Time magazine poll, who oppose the “Ground Zero mosque.”
How excited should we get about this? Not very. You would probably get a similar figure if you asked people in any almost Muslim country whether they see Americans as a new generation of “crusaders.” They aren’t, any more than Muslims are terrorists, but the Muslim Middle East has a rather one-sided view of the Crusades.
So why am I going to lose my bets on the outcome of the mid-term elections?
Because the primaries attract at most 10 percent of the potential voters, and they tend to be the ideologically committed ones.
Hard-right candidates can win that audience over – but when 50 or 60 per cent of American voters come out in the real election, the extremists tend to lose in the critical districts where the outcome might go either way.
The Democrats will keep their Senate majority. They might even keep the House.
Gwynne Dyer is a freelance journalist living in London.